Posted on 01/01/2025 5:34:53 AM PST by MtnClimber
In my Sunday Smiles essay, I riffed on this Washington Post retrospective on Joe Biden's presidency and how it soft-pedaled Biden's disastrous policies and all the important questions about who was really in charge over the past few years.
I reserved for today the most important "revelation" in the story: Biden considers one of his biggest mistakes the choice of Merrick Garland for Attorney General. Garland, in his view, was not political enough.
It may seem odd to normal people that anybody could think that Garland was anything but a political hack over the past four years, but seen through the eyes of Democratic Party operatives, you can see how such an absurd idea seems normal.
During the 2020 presidential transition, Biden’s attorney general selection pitted some of his closest aides against each other. Former senator Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware) and Mark Gitenstein, both longtime friends of Biden, advocated for the president naming then-Sen. Doug Jones (D-Alabama) as attorney general, arguing that as a politician he would be better able to navigate the bitterly partisan moment.
But Ron Klain, Biden’s incoming chief of staff, pushed for Garland. He stressed that Garland — a federal judge with a sterling reputation for independence and fairness — would show Americans that Biden was rebuilding a department badly shaken by Trump’s political attacks.
Biden was persuaded, and some Democrats believe the decision had devastating results. Had the Justice Department moved faster to prosecute Trump for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents, they say, the former president might have faced a politically damaging trial before the election. (Others blame the Supreme Court and a Trump-appointed judge in Florida for repeatedly siding with the former president and delaying the cases; the Justice Department declined to comment.)
Biden's preference for a sitting Democrat senator over a judge with aspirations to sit on the Supreme Court makes sense. Garland was not averse to playing politics, but he wanted everything to have at least the patina of being lawful. A politician whose elevation to the slot of Attorney General would have been less concerned about painting within the lines.
What sticks out about this tidbit, though, is not Biden's regret but the reason for it: his strategy for defeating Donald Trump depended upon using the Justice Department to prosecute Trump to tie him up during the campaign and use allegations to undermine Trump.
On the one hand, you could say, "That's obviously true," but on the other, this amounts to an admission that Biden's election strategy was to weaponize the Justice Department. SNIP
Trump should show Biden to the back of the barn & apply some wisdom to him.
lawfaremedia.org
by Quinta Jurecic, Tuesday, March 12, 2024
The Lawfare Institute in Cooperation With Brookings
The Whitewashed “Hur Report” WRT Biden’s diminishing mental faculties
The well-rehearsed Biden’s convincing act for the gullible Hur kept Biden out of jail
Special Counsel Robert Hur is coming in for scrutiny from the press over his characterizations of President Biden’s memory. The special counsel’s report on Biden’s handling of classified information, characterized “significant limitations” in Biden’s memory during the president’s interview with Hur’s office.
Those limitations, in Hur’s view, justified a decision to decline to prosecute the president, despite Hur’s unflattering depiction of the volume of classified information discovered at his Delaware home and at the Penn Biden Center, and Biden’s mishandling of it.
Biden, Hur reasoned in his report, could be successful in presenting himself to a jury as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
But today, March 12, the full transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden was made public in advance of the special counsel’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.
And as reporters noted, the Biden of the transcript looks quite different from the forgetful Biden described in the report.
“Biden doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be,” wrote the Washington Post. Both the Post and the Wall Street Journal described the transcript as “more nuanced” than the report itself in terms of what it showed about Biden’s memory.
Yet there’s an irony to the media’s criticisms of Hur in light of the transcript. Overstated though his report might have been, Hur’s interest in Biden’s age was no match for that of the mainstream press itself.
Consider how the Times and the Washington Post covered the original report. “Special Counsel’s Report Puts Biden’s Age and Memory in the Spotlight,” blared the headline of a New York Times article, which described the Hur report as a “political disaster.”
The Washington Post characterized the mood among Democrats as “hair on fire.” By one tally, the Times and the Post each published over 30 stories about Biden’s age and memory in the days following the release of Hur’s report.
“IS BIDEN’S AGE NOW A BIGGER PROBLEM THAN TRUMP’S INDICTMENTS?” asked a CNN chyron two days after the release of Hur’s report.
snip
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